Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

Thank you for the opportunity to stand and support the second reading of the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I would like to acknowledge the Hon Judith Collins for her leadership in sponsoring this bill.

The previous speaker on the last bill, Rino Tirikatene, mentioned that this Government should be doing something important. This bill is a very important bill that brings in some of the changes to our energy sector, so we can have a diverse opportunity to talk about this. This omni-purpose bill aims to encourage energy innovation, including emerging energy technologies and increased variation in energy-related business models, so that New Zealand is well placed to effectively respond to its evolving environmental and energy objectives.

New Zealand is one of the signatories on some of these issues, and we want to ensure that we have got legislation in place to deal with such issues. National is committed to ensuring New Zealand meets its international commitments regarding global climate change. Consistent with those commitments, the National-led Government is focused on improving the efficiency of New Zealand’s use of energy. As of now, we are producing more than 80 percent of our energy from the renewable resources, which is very well respected all over the world.

Efforts are being made to improve energy use productivity. If well managed, it can be good economically and will promote innovation, while also facilitating efforts to better manage our greenhouse gas emissions. Transport energy and process heat are two major areas where positive gains can, and will, be made to our climate change commitments, while improving the efficient use of our precious energy resources. Our vehicles are mostly run on fossil fuels. If we are able to encourage the use of more electric-driven vehicles, then that can really help to reduce our emissions, and it will have a more positive effect on our emission house gases.

This bill implements part of the National-led Government’s electric vehicle programme. It makes changes to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority levy funding and clarifies that electricity industry legislation applies to secondary networks. With these words, I commend this bill to the House.

I call Stuart Nash.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Oh, this’ll be good.

Thank you very much, Ruth. I will do my best. Look, I do disagree with the last speaker, Mr Bakshi, on one thing. He said that this is a very important bill. Well, if it was a very important bill, then I would be standing up here and saying that this is finally a Government that embraces innovation and that is going to drive meaningful change in this country.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Then he would’ve spoken for longer than 3 minutes.

And you are right, the member would have spoken for longer than 10 minutes—or 5 minutes or 3 minutes.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: 3.

3 minutes? Goodness me! You cannot say that this is a really important bill and speak for 3 minutes. If this was a really important bill, then, like the Minister, Dr Coleman, you would stand up here and wax lyrical about how it is going to change the world. It will not.

The interesting thing about this—let me tell you a very interesting story. Simon Bridges, who was the Minister of Energy and Resources—there was a PR shot of him. I think he was there registering the thousandth electric vehicle in the country. What he did was he drove up in this huge big diesel BMW. He got out, took the photo shoot about the electric vehicle, then jumped into this huge big BMW diesel vehicle and drove back. I would have thought that if the Government was into meaningful change around electric vehicles, then what it would have done—the first thing it would have done—was replace its Government Crown fleet with electric vehicles.

In fact, I was talking to a gentleman friend of mine who knows Elon Musk very well, and I was telling him about this, and this gentleman said: “I bet you if the New Zealand Government went to Elon Musk and said ‘We want to replace our Crown fleet with Teslas.’, Elon Musk would say: ‘How many do you need and when do you need them there?’.” He said it would be a beautiful partnership between a guy who knows his marketing—I mean, it does not come any better than Elon Musk, from a global perspective—and the New Zealand Government.

I think this party sometimes forgets that our global brand is “clean, green”, “100% Pure”. We have a brand that lends itself to innovation. In fact, in 2005 the then Ministry of Economic Development tried to value this brand. It is very difficult to value a brand, we know that, but 17 years ago they came up and said our global brand—which started as a marketing brand, to be fair, but was so successful it morphed into our national brand—was valued at $20 billion a year. That is what people overseas will pay for products from New Zealand or for the New Zealand experience, and yet here we are. Our Ministers, who are responsible, who are guardians of our national brand, drive huge big diesel BMWs. Drive Teslas—that is still pretty cool. Imagine picking up international dignitaries in a Tesla. That would send a very clear message to the world that not only do we value our brand, but we are actually walking the walk.

What this bill does is it purports to sort of champion electric vehicles, but it does not go nearly far enough in what we view is an innovative way to send the global community a very clear message—that not only do we value our brand but we live it, and not only do we live it but we as a Government put policies in place to really champion this. But this bill is not about energy innovation. It is a small wee step. We are supporting it, I must admit. It is the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. We are supporting it because it would probably be a little bit churlish not to, because we do believe in energy innovation. We do believe in electric vehicles. The other matters—well, they are just part and parcel of an amendment bill. But if the Government really wanted to be innovative—if this was a Labour Government putting this forward—you would see a bill that was incredibly innovative and drove change in a way that played into our global brand.

In terms of driving this innovation, the Government fleet is by far the largest fleet on the roads. The Parliamentary Library gave me some statistics and said it was about 20,000 vehicles, I think. It is huge, so the way to really drive innovation, I would say to Simon Bridges—and the members over there know. You can see their heads are bowed, because they are a little bit ashamed of this little bit of nothing bill—a bit like the ones we have been debating in the last couple of weeks. The way to really drive innovation would have been to actually take the bull by the horns and say: “Not only are we going to transition our Crown fleet, we are going to transition the Government fleet to electric vehicles.” When that happens, when the Government makes a decision to do that, it will have a whole lot of downstream effects. What it does is it gives business and gives the private sector the confidence that they need to be to invest in the infrastructure that is required to really drive the electric vehicle fleet right across the country.

There are a couple of interesting things in this bill. The first one is it allows regional authorities or territorial authorities to permit electric cars to go down bus lanes. That sounds, on the surface, like it is not a bad idea. It means that if you have got an electric vehicle, if you have invested in an electric vehicle, then you can probably get to work a little earlier. The thing about that, though, is they think there are going to be about 64,000 electric vehicles in the next 10 years. That is good uptake, but what is the point in having a bus lane, what is the point in parking at some place that is remote and jumping on a bus, if in Auckland you are competing with 50,000 of those 64,000 electric vehicles? It actually makes no sense.

I do not think that people will invest in an electric vehicle because they can drive in a bus lane. They might initially, but that sort of competitive advantage will disappear extremely quickly. People invest in electric vehicles for a number of reasons. First of all, obviously, the cost of petrol drops considerably, because you have not got petrol if it is fully electric; if it is a hybrid, then you pay very little, is my understanding, if you to keep it charged and drive it around town. The second reason is that it is actually the right thing to do. We hear about climate change and we understand the impact it has—and we were global leaders in this space. Again, it plays into our global brand. We used to be leaders; now we are laggards. But it is a consumer’s way of doing the right thing. The Minister of Transport himself has said he has bought two electric vehicles for his own household. That is quite ironic, is it not? He will buy an electric vehicle for his own household, but he will not encourage his colleagues to transition the Crown fleet to electric vehicles.

💬 Peeni Henare: Goose and gander.

You are dead right. What is good for the goose should be good for the gander, is that right—it is something like that.

💬 Peeni Henare: They’re all gooses.

Ha, ha! What I mean is you have got to start walking the walk. Do not buy an electric vehicle so you can drive in the bus lane. That is a bit of an anomaly.

The other thing that is in this bill that we need to be aware of, because it is one of these things that has sort of been slipped in there, is something called a gas levy, and it is quite substantial. It is a couple of million dollars a year, and it goes back into promoting safety around gas and that sort of stuff. Well, it used to be collected at the wholesale selling point. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment itself admits that there was significant under-recovery of this gas levy—I mean, up to 50 percent. In essence, it was not being recovered, and we came to the impression it was not not being recovered due to any sort of incompetence or any sort of of illegal activity; it was just incredibly hard to collect, because it is such a small percentage on a per unit basis, but when you add it up, it actually adds up to quite a bit.

So it is now going to be collected at the retail point, which makes a lot of sense—we all agreed on that—but one thing that we are going to be keeping an eye on is that retailers do not use this as an excuse to drive up the price of gas. The last thing we want to see after this bill receives Royal assent is everyone who has got a gas bill—and there are a lot of people who have got them—seeing: “Oh, we are now going to charge you a couple of cents extra per unit used, because Parliament has passed a gas levy, which means that we have to collect it.” That would be dishonest, because what we were told at the Commerce Committee was that the portion of this levy per unit used is infinitesimal, so it should not make any difference whatsoever to anyone’s gas bill at all. It just changes the point in the whole supply chain around where this levy is collected. I would say to anyone who is watching this that if you are on gas—and I am myself—and you see a new item on your gas bill that says “gas levy”, then query it, or get hold of me, or, better still, get hold of the Minister of Energy and Resources, and say “This is wrong, because this should not be here.”, because we do not want to see this levy as an excuse to increase charges to consumers.

Just summing up, we are for innovation. I personally believe that we need to drive innovation in a way that we are not doing at the moment, and I firmly believe that when it comes to the energy sector, and certainly electric vehicles, the Government has a very important role to play. I am not talking about subsidies; I am talking about Government behaviour. Imagine if the Prime Minister turned up in an electric vehicle—imagine the message that would send. Imagine the message it would send if not only were the Minister of Transport’s personal vehicles electric but his Crown car was an electric vehicle. It is incredibly easy to do. The message it sends would be incredibly powerful, so instead of this sort of nothing piece of legislation—it is a start, but it is not the start we need. I think the Government needs to be a lot more innovative. The thing that you will find with a Labour Government is we will bring a fresh approach to this sort of innovation, to this sort of sector, with fresh ideas around how to drive this forward. Thank you very much.

It is a pleasure to speak on the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This is about innovation—

💬 Tracey Martin: No it’s not.

—and if we cast our minds back in history to when the motor vehicle really got going, just prior to that period, and I am sure the leader of New Zealand First will remember this well, the internal combustion engine had not really gained the foothold. It was a real toss-up as to whether electric vehicles or the internal combustion engine would be the mode of transport of choice. However, the internal combustion engine won that race, and hopefully the leader of New Zealand First bought the right vehicle at that time.

We have built our economy around the internal combustion engine, and we are in a period now of rapid change. I think for some, they would like things to change overnight, as the previous speaker, Stuart Nash, perhaps was alluding to. Electric vehicles require charging stations at regular intervals, and we are only just getting to that point now. In fact, there are two charging stations right in the middle of Kaikōura, put in there not long before the earthquake, as it turns out, and they are sitting there as part of State Highway 1. There will be more stations installed along State Highway 1, which will make it much more practical for the use of electric vehicles.

One of the issues that people face with electric vehicles is the anxiety over the range of those vehicles. Although most people’s—in fact, the average distance of driving a vehicle in a day is fewer than 30 kilometres, and people have this anxiety that they need to be able to drive for several hundred kilometres and be able to fuel up, or charge up, and continue a journey, when they very infrequently take trips of that length.

It is a very interesting time that we are living in, where we are sitting here now, waiting for this revolution that is coming our way. But what comes first? Government regulations have some part to play, and this bill is part of that, so that we can allow the ground for the market to work in the way that it will, to get this across the line.

We had an e-day in Marlborough a couple of months ago and it was fantastic to get along and see the electric cars that were available on display that day—even electric lawnmowers, believe it or not. A ride-on electric lawnmower—I did not think there was such a thing, but there is. I was not quite so taken with that as I was with the little robotic one where it does its own thing and you do not even have to go out and sit on it—which would be quite good, I have to say. I am trying to talk my wife into getting one—save me a job.

Electric vehicles will come, but we need to get all of those things in place. Battery technology is coming a long way, but the latest vehicles—each iteration that comes out has that greater range, has that greater usability for users, but we need those charging stations along the way and there is a great group putting them in. I think there has been fantastic progress made, and there will be more in the near future. But I guess the big prize for us is heavy transport fuel, which is actually a big thing in terms of climate change and, as an executive member of GLOBE, it is something I turn my mind to quite a bit and how we might deal with that. Interestingly, in Norway they have electric ships; I think we are a long way from that here in New Zealand.

Anyway, I think this is a fantastic bill and it is a great step—great leadership shown by the Government in this area—and it will evolve in time. In a few years’ time we will look back and think how quickly things have changed. I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a second time.